Yeah, that old guy definitely is working at half capacity or less, probably listens to a boatload of books on tape and podcasts, and still probably makes just as much as he used to in R&D.
Your anecdote about getting halfway through a presentation only for some old R&D guy to let you know it has been tried (in front of everyone in the conference room) is stunningly accurate and has happened to me multiple times as an R& D engineer. The most infuriating thing is how it always ends up being your fault for no one keeping reports on R&D projects-- the implication being that you are supposed to hire a PI to see if anyone has already looked into an opportunity before.
Yup, it's your fault (and somehow not the R&D director/managers?) for not seeking out the counsel of someone who doesn't really interact with anyone most days, but you've got to hold to some crazy timeline that someone above you agreed to before you even started at the company or joined the project.
Now, it's all on you to get it across the finish line and in the hands of your customers and to make sure it gets finished on budget too. It's the "highest" priority.
9 months later your company is bought by a competitor, the executive team who you were reporting to directly have been laid off, and your project is killed by your new management team.
2 months later you get tasked with a new project that is the "highest priority."
Yup. The version of this that I'm most familiar with goes like this:
(1) Company's R&D team has a robust culture of documenting research outcomes in reports.
(2) Company decides that they need more patents, so they tell their reluctant R&D team to write more, and give out cash bonuses for every filing as "encouragement". (Usually while also holding salary increases to some minimal amount)
(3) R&D team suddenly gets very interested in filing patents, and stops writing reports.
(4) Ten years later, TFNG (a new employee) joins the company and asks where they can learn about past technical work. TFNG is told to "just read the patents".
Love that you mentioned "culture defining" digital solution. A new fancy tool without anybody in the company willing to use it ultimately dies.
It is definitely super expensive and slow to move a non-digital first company to the modern era, but I definitely see LLMs making that significantly faster. I was literally reading this paper the other day https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.14.544984v1.full.pdf and it's impressive how well LLMs are able to take raw input and text and cleanly pipe that into a desired data format.
I'm sure it took a while for people to get the hang of using email and SAP for managing a chemical plant, but they eventually got there, and those digital tools definitely get baked into the culture of a company. Its why SAP is so sticky once it actually gets implemented.
If you can get an LLM to take a jumble of word documents, powerpoints, and excel files and actually turn it into something useful then we will really be off to the races.
Great piece. These problems sound familiar! Part of why the PE roll up strategy is an issue is because they always involve massive ERP consolidations which A) always run over budget and are delayed and B) end poorly and make co’s even LESS efficient because they can never get the data layer right. Same thing with CRM.
The root cause holding the industry back from digital (and business) transformation is that their product data is stuck offline. Digitizing this is the first step towards unlocking all of those front-of-house and internal efficiencies you mention.
Spot on with the list of trends within PE owned companies! Though I think my biggest take away was to become the old guy who runs the GC-MS.
Yeah, that old guy definitely is working at half capacity or less, probably listens to a boatload of books on tape and podcasts, and still probably makes just as much as he used to in R&D.
Your anecdote about getting halfway through a presentation only for some old R&D guy to let you know it has been tried (in front of everyone in the conference room) is stunningly accurate and has happened to me multiple times as an R& D engineer. The most infuriating thing is how it always ends up being your fault for no one keeping reports on R&D projects-- the implication being that you are supposed to hire a PI to see if anyone has already looked into an opportunity before.
Yup, it's your fault (and somehow not the R&D director/managers?) for not seeking out the counsel of someone who doesn't really interact with anyone most days, but you've got to hold to some crazy timeline that someone above you agreed to before you even started at the company or joined the project.
Now, it's all on you to get it across the finish line and in the hands of your customers and to make sure it gets finished on budget too. It's the "highest" priority.
9 months later your company is bought by a competitor, the executive team who you were reporting to directly have been laid off, and your project is killed by your new management team.
2 months later you get tasked with a new project that is the "highest priority."
Rinse and repeat.
Yup. The version of this that I'm most familiar with goes like this:
(1) Company's R&D team has a robust culture of documenting research outcomes in reports.
(2) Company decides that they need more patents, so they tell their reluctant R&D team to write more, and give out cash bonuses for every filing as "encouragement". (Usually while also holding salary increases to some minimal amount)
(3) R&D team suddenly gets very interested in filing patents, and stops writing reports.
(4) Ten years later, TFNG (a new employee) joins the company and asks where they can learn about past technical work. TFNG is told to "just read the patents".
Love that you mentioned "culture defining" digital solution. A new fancy tool without anybody in the company willing to use it ultimately dies.
It is definitely super expensive and slow to move a non-digital first company to the modern era, but I definitely see LLMs making that significantly faster. I was literally reading this paper the other day https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.06.14.544984v1.full.pdf and it's impressive how well LLMs are able to take raw input and text and cleanly pipe that into a desired data format.
I'm sure it took a while for people to get the hang of using email and SAP for managing a chemical plant, but they eventually got there, and those digital tools definitely get baked into the culture of a company. Its why SAP is so sticky once it actually gets implemented.
If you can get an LLM to take a jumble of word documents, powerpoints, and excel files and actually turn it into something useful then we will really be off to the races.
Great piece. These problems sound familiar! Part of why the PE roll up strategy is an issue is because they always involve massive ERP consolidations which A) always run over budget and are delayed and B) end poorly and make co’s even LESS efficient because they can never get the data layer right. Same thing with CRM.
The root cause holding the industry back from digital (and business) transformation is that their product data is stuck offline. Digitizing this is the first step towards unlocking all of those front-of-house and internal efficiencies you mention.
This is the way